course there is really no French type, for the sections of few nations are more diverse than those of France; but it is a testimony to the permeating power of the Provençal genius that we can even loosely think of it as representing the nation. To begin with, France is very different from Paris. If you wandered all over France and then discovered Paris, not having heard of it before you would come on it with astonishment. It would not appear to you by any means a compendium of what you had seen. There is a ferment in Paris which has no counterpart in the serene dullness of most country towns. Yet every province has its own nature which makes it more different from other provinces than the Welsh or Scotch are from the English. The Breton, being a Celt, is devout, superstitious, kindly, and frequently prodigal; the peasants of Normandy are as good at bargains as a Yorkshireman at selling a horse; the heavy, deliberate people of Picardy seem to be made only to eat, drink, work, and sleep, and when they drink too much they do so with less grace than the Bretons; the Provençals have no need of their wine to heighten their emotions, their climate endows them with all their volatility and expansiveness. And yet, in spite of these vivid contrasts and oppositions, the Provençals are on the whole more "French" than any people in France.

deed we do; for this is one of the signs that the spirit of Provence has made itself felt even among us Englishmen. Songs, rustic poetry, legends, and dances make themselves plainly heard and seen across the sea and hills which divide us from the sunny South of France; and the mind of Keats turned instinctively to Provence as representing the allegro side of life:

O for a draught of vintage! that hath been

Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvéd

earth,

Tasting of Flora and the country-green, Dance, and Provençal song, and sun

burnt mirth

The Provençals are the children of that dry, sparkling air of theirs which is like the air of lofty plateaus. They are not painters, they are not architects; they are poets,-and always have been. Frédéric Mistral is only the latest, and one of the most accomplished, of a very long poetical dynasty. One cannot hear the soft tones and marked and incessant cadences of Provençal speech without feeling that it must be set to music. The troubadours were musicians as well as poets. It is even possible that music counted sometimes for more than the poetry. (In all countries bad poetry is sometimes immortalized by attractive music.) And the troubadours were not like mediæval jesters in an English house. Their profession drew into its ranks some of the noblest in the land. To be a good amateur troubadour was, we imagine, an end as desirable as to be a first-class amateur cricketer in England to-day. William of Poitiers gave respectability to the fraternity. Even the monks burst into song on the national model. The jongleurs, or minstrels, also, were not mountebanks and pariahs like actors in England; they had a reflected glory from the higher grade of the singing and reciting

profession.

Coeur-de-Lion

Richard was a troubadour, and a good one too. The Provençals had a theory that you could not write love verses unless you were in love. That is no doubt an excellent principle, if not always exactly what we could call practical. But whether the troubadours lived up to their theory or not, their devout and highly reverential invocations to the objects of their passion will always remain examples of love verses for the world to admire. The ample and complex rhyming was considered by Dante himself worthy of imitation.

There came a time when the troubadours, who had spread the spirit of Provence throughout the whole civilized world of the West, were swept away. They melted like snow before the rigors of the Albigensian wars, which laid waste the South of France, destroyed the castles, and ruined the landowners. At least it has always been said that the troubadours scattered before the tide of war into Italy and Spain. Others may think that their art had hardened into an artificiality and monotony which were to a large extent their own undoing. However that may be, spontaneous and beautiful singing had once been heard in the land, and now was heard no more. For three hundred years the people cultivated no folk-songs or legends in poetry. Attempts were made fitfully from the seventeenth century onwards to revive the poetical glories of Provence, but it would not be a harsh judgment to say that no attempt had any success worthy of the name till the rise of Frédéric Mistral.

Mistral grew up among the sights and sounds of a Provençal farm. He moved among the peasants, who were his friends, and learned and cherished the tales and phrases of the people which had persevered through generations but were bereft of the form of poetry. He conceived the ambition

to make the peasants, the scenery, and the history and legends of Provence live again in poetry written in the common language. He aimed at a revival. It was a perilous aspiration. How many have attempted to revive an admired period of the past and have produced only a monstrous insincerity! The "first, fine, careless rapture" can hardly ever be recaptured. But Mistral has succeeded, because he has conveyed from one age to another only things which were essential. He has transported the spirit, not the body. "Mirèio," his best, earliest, and most famous work, is an epic in dialect. The story is a very simple one of a rich girl who is kept apart from her poor lover, and dies in his presence when, too late, they are brought together. This simple incident is clothed with all the true epic qualities; descriptions of scenery and of popular customs, and a great array of simile are employed. The elementary facts of Nature and human life are interwoven with the very elements of human emotion. And in form the poem is cast after the great models of Homer and Virgil. If Homer had never written, we should not have "Mirèio" precisely as it is. Ronsard and his colleagues of the Pléjade turned away from classical forms to follow the dictates of Nature and truth, but Mistral has found both in a return to the oldest of classical models. Poetry is justified of all her children. Like the troubadours before him, Mistral has fallen into a certain monotony in some of his later poems; he has dragged in his Provençal lore in and out of season. But in "Mirèio" the set ting is all perfectly appropriate to the narrative, and indeed indispensable to

it. Provence has been parcelled out in departments like the rest of France ever since the time of Mirabeau, and can no longer boast a political identity. but the Provençal ethos remains. The Félibrige who applied themselves half

a-century ago under Mistral's schoolmaster, Romanille, to a Provençal literary revival have triumphed. That is the meaning of the festivities at Arles. We Englishmen may join in them from The Spectator.

a distance, for we know that we, and all the world, would be immeasurably poorer without the langue d' oc and the Provençal strain.

The Macmillan Company publishes a Pocket Lexicon and Concordance to the Temple Shakespeare, which is a marvel of compact and convenient arrangement. Owners of the dainty Temple Shakespeare will find it indispensable, but while the page references especially adapt it to that edition, it has its uses with any.

Mr. J. T. Trowbridge's advancing years appear to have made no impression upon his abounding vitality or his sympathy with young people, and his name is still a good one to conjure with among young readers. His latest volume "A Pair of Madcaps" (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.) is made up of one long story, which gives the book its title, and six or eight shorter tales. They have been published in magazines, the first under the title "The Boy and the Beast"-but this is their first appearance in a volume. They are lively and humorous without any straining after effect-which is something to be thankful for, for what is more laborious than labored humor?

There is a pungency in Calvin Dill Wilson's second series of talks for young people on "Making the Most of Ourselves" which will commend them even to the less thoughtful; while to young men or women who cherish a real ambition to make themselves of use in the world, there is in them a heartiness, a good sense, a sincerity of sympathy and an elevated purpose

ment and an inspiration. Such practical subjects as "Earning a Living," "Cocksureness," "You and Your Job," "Saving Something," "Finding what You Want in Books," "Making Heavens and Hells upon Earth," "Do Not be Afraid," "Higher Things," "The Choice of an Occupation," and scores of others are treated in these crisp little essays with unfailing tact, force and insight. A. C. McClurg & Co.

The seventh volume of "The Works of James Buchanan" collected and edited by John Bassett Moore, and published in a limited edition by the J. B. Lippincott Company, covers the years 1846-48. Mr. Buchanan was then secretary of State, and very important public questions, such as the Oregon settlement and the Mexican war, were engaging the public mind, and still more important questions which led up to the civil war were brewing. All of the public affairs of the period were touched upon in Mr. Buchanan's state papers and private correspondence; and as Mr. Moore has gone upon the general principle that nothing which Mr. Buchanan wrote could wisely be omitted, we have here, as in the other volumes, purely personal matters, such as the arrangements made for Miss Lane's outing at the seashore, interspersed with grave state papers. This imparts an unexpected flavor of piquancy.